The Second World War came to Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941; two weeks after a group of anti-German military officers overthrew the pro-Axis government of the royal regent Prince Paul and placed the seventeen-year-old King Peter upon the throne. A massive invasion by powerful Nazi German armored and air forces supported by infantry overran the entirety of Yugoslavia in only eleven days. An ominous sign of the fratricidal days to come were the cheers of the pro-German Croatians that greeted the men and tanks of the Fourteenth Panzer Division as they arri

The Ustashi were a fanatical organization of ultra-national Croats and by far the most vicious and bloodthirsty of all the participants in the warfare in Yugoslavia. A “good Ustashi” as described by their commander, Ante Pavelich, “is he who can use his knife to cut a child from the womb of his mother.” Servants of the newly independent state of Croatia, the Ustashi besides fighting the Partisans and the Chetniks carried out a genocidal “final solution” on such a large scale and with such sadistic intensity that it even shocked their Nazi allies. The wars end in 1945 had systematically liquidated 60,000 Jews, 26,000 Gypsies and an estimated 750,000 Eastern Orthodox Serbs. Such was the extent of the killing and torture accompanying it, that an Italian correspondent during an interview with the Ustashi leader Pavelich, reported being shown a wicker basket upon the Ustashi’s desk, the contents, “forty pounds of eyes gouged out from the victims of the Ustashi.” In reflection the Partisan reprisals following the end of the war against the Ustashi were inevitable.

The first to organize were the Chetniks. They were a force of Serbian irregulars loyal to King Peter and under the command of Colonel Drazha Mihailovich, a Serbian army officer who had escaped to the hills in traditional Balkan fashion to continue the war. His overall goal was the return of the Serbian King Peter at any cost. Seeing the communists of Tito as a threat to be feared as much as the occupiers, Mihailovich was not above occasional collaboration with the Germans and the Italians if it presented a chance to strike a blow against the Partisan forces. The Chetniks were involved in constant series of atrocities with the Croatian Ustashi involving tit for

Some topics in this essay:
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